Everything You'll Be

- The "I finished College" round-up.

“Basically, any country which hates America, he’s buddy buddy with.”

And so ended my final class period at the University of Maryland, on an ineffectual rant by an anti-Hugo Chavez chap in a marle-grey “Maryland’ sweatshirt doing a presentation-turned-soapbox on Venezuela for extra credit.

I had a surprisingly faint desire to raise rowdy objection: “As co-founder of the DC underground Chavista movement, I hereby stamp the mighty red flag of the Oppressed into your Yanqui imperialist heart. Muahahaha (ha…ha)” I heard myself scream.

But instead, I continued surfing news headlines on my laptop. Depressingly, I couldn’t even muster the sincerity to pay attention to my disconnected peers in this, my ultimate lecture. Perhaps fittingly as far as career path goes, it was in ECON315: “Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries.” But of all the minds and ideas that I have encountered in my time in college, of all the moments where I’ve stepped out of a classroom with head swimming in re-evaluated thoughts or punch drunk on a fresh theory, it was completely inappropriate for me to go out with this class. The teacher, who is a Latin American PhD candidate, is a right-leaning free trade sympathizer who has announced his desire to jump ship on his home country for the plasma TV-owning lifestyle of the World Bank technocrat, citing his hopeless pessimism in Argentina’s ability to curb pervasive corruption. This, in a classroom filled with at least a proportion of students whom I hope are actually interested in doing something about, you know, the economic development of underdeveloped countries. Beyond that, however, his devastatingly ineffective efforts at lecturing—employing frequent 10-second silences as he stammered his way to some over-qualified response to an elementary question; his less-than-stellar exam question grammar:

”The Solow model predict absolute convergence that is all countries will end up with the same GDP per capita if and only if…”

…and his drastic simplification of a 750-page tome’s worth of relevant material into cartoonishly superficial PowerPoint’s offered little to sub-zero intellectual inspiration.

But it wasn’t always so. Indeed, as I prepare to walk the stage next week, cap and gowning the end to this small, collegiate chapter of my life, I reflect on the events and lessons I might actually want to remember some years from now.

If one were to chart my college journey, the variables would likely involve political spectrums and identity conceptualizations.

My freshman year saw me dive headfirst into activism. Coming from the Republican quagmire of suburban Howard County, I entered university with 1968 on my mind and a yearning for some “Capitalism is rubbish” conversation. I recall the heady rush of the first Peace Forum meeting, where a colourful coalition of peaceniks, Red Guard uniformed socialists, conservative ‘hostiles’ and interested kids like myself discussed the recently elected Bush Jr. administration’s aggressive vision for the Middle East. What followed was a whirlwind of tabling, teach-ins, fundraisers, debates, and protests, protests, protests. Whether traveling en masse to large-scale United for Peace and Justice demonstrations in D.C. or leading midday campus walk-outs and die-ins, I became well-versed in the rhythmic plastic bucket beats of protest drumming and catchy chants such as:

“Hell No! We won’t go! We won’t fight for Texaco!”

I recall the night that the “Shock and Awe” campaign began, huddled in the dorm room of fellow peace activist Rohinna, recoiling in horror at the televised sight of the very actions we had dedicated our 18-year-old hearts and souls into preventing. An ROTC floor mate, whose front door was emblazoned with pro-War propaganda extending far beyond the peace sign scarf which adorned mine, blasted Outkast’s “Bombs over Baghdad” that night. Others on my floor became enthused at the fighter plane love-fest being paraded across the broadcast media: “We’re gonna fuck the hell out of them!” one exclaimed, much like he might concerning a rival football team or an invading enemy on a Playstation game, and not the children of Iraq.

It could have been that very night which led me toward the field of peacebuilding, or towards the post-conflict reconstruction of East Timor two years later.

Though I flirted with other progressive issues, including contract struggles for university workers, environmental conservation, and building a revolutionary socialist party, I settled on my major pet issue in global HIV/AIDS. A petri dish for social justice affairs, fighting this torrid epidemic has brought me into solidarity and friendship with a variety of minority groups from many walks of life. Zackie Achmat, the Mandela of the movement in South Africa, revealed his organizing tactic to me over breakfast at Afterword café one breakfast (“We just did it!"). Youth peer counselors from Nigeria and Botswana, HIV-positive members of ACT UP New York, reproductive health providers from Portugal, spoken word poets from Baltimore and many a public health EuroNGOer* in Brussels; all have been bright jewels in my evolving understanding of this ruthless virus and the beautiful resistance of humanity it has spurred. My mentor, now an organizer in New York City, told me that even if our organization crumbles, the movement will live on, because “it’s strong as hell.”

Revitalizing the then-defunct Student Global AIDS Campaign chapter at my campus, and seeing it flourish into one of the University’s most prominent student organizations is the closest thing to a legacy I will leave behind.

Behind the activism there was always the ideology. Intellectually, I spent the majority of my college years is psycho-political resistance, intoxicated with the great ideas of Marx and his followers. Ecological anarchism, Trotsky’s permanent revolution, Gramscian hegemony, and Lukacs’ “History and Class Consciousness” were the order of my internal debate, as I analyzed the alienation and reification displayed by my fellow students: wearing “in” Che and CCCP shirts, watching Superbowl advertisements, eating Taco Bell in the food court. In London, I paid my respects at Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, writing an unashamedly ambitious reflection about how the term “Markism” might sound as the future Marxism (!) Later, in Las Vegas, I would lament the symbolic virtuality of the casino complexes “The Venetian” and “Paris,” using the post-modern ideas of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard as my chalk board.

Soon afterwards, like thousands of young students before me, I stopped seeing the revolution, rejected rejection and finally decided to enter into “the system.” Though part of me (the rational, Asian side) regrets not spending time reading more practical subject matter, I like to justify my two year flirtation with radical politics as a testament to the heady idealism of youth.

More so than anything else, attending the University of Maryland provided context. As much of a mainstream liberal bubble as it is, and as privileged as many of the students still are, it is far more diverse than the unaffordable political office feeder institutions inside D.C. It was here that I got my taste of real J.A.P.s**, Long Island frat boys, sororitutes and other factions of the lowest common denominator that it would be more PC to not lump together, but far less satisfying. Though I am leaving College Park only now, I departed from its seedy, beer-pong-infested shores in spirit several years ago, and it’s the drunken loutishness and “Fuck Duke!” tribalists I have most to thank for facilitating this abridged emigration. The Food Co-op, sanctuary of progressive cuisine and spicy soundtracked sandwich lines, has been an island oasis within a sea of fast-paced materialism; devoted faculty and an opportunist’s bounty of extracurricular activities provided me with the monotony-breaking hobbies of meditation and salsa. Most importantly, I've learned what it is to be Australian, to live in America, to be upwardly mobile, about where one fits into the class and stratification of today's world.

So fare well, College Park, and stay classy. It’s been a good three and a half years, and I’ll look back with some satisfaction at what we’ve shared. And, in disjointed fashion, I'll finish by noting that where in previous times I would have jumped to the defense of anti-imperialist Generalissimo Chavez at the slightest hint of bourgeois elite critique, today, I'd rather work towards something far more constructive.

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*European non-governmental organization
**Jewish American Princesses, not to be nor easily confused with Japanese nationals